The Hartford Times
newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut
The Hartford Times was a daily afternoon newspaper serving the Hartford, Connecticut, community from 1817 to 1976. It was owned for decades by the Gannett Company which sold the financially struggling paper in 1973 to the owners of the New Haven Register, who failed to turn things around leading to its closure in 1976.
History
The Times was a leading newspaper in Connecticut with the largest circulation in the state in 1917. It was started by Frederick D. Bolles and John M. Niles, a future senator, as an anti-federalist weekly by the name of The Hartford Weekly Times in 1817. It styled itself as a champion of reform and an advocate for the people throughout its history. One early editor was Gideon Welles, later secretary of the Navy during the Civil War. Alfred E. Burr led the paper for over six decades from 1829 until 1890, making it a daily and giving him considerable political influence statewide.
In 1920 at the height of its success the paper commissioned architect Donn Barber to build a new headquarters, The Hartford Times Building. He salvaged six massive granite pillars and other architectural details from the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, a famous work of Stanford White. A series of murals behind the columns allegorize the motto, "News is an immortal bubble and the press endures within."
The newspaper was purchased by the Gannett interests in early 1928.
The public source identifies “The Hartford Times” as newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Hartford, Times and newspaper.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7738949. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1817, 1976, 1973 and 1917.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Hartford Times” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.